Streetsblog New York City

Workers in the Hudson Square area are demanding bike infrastructure and employers are helping them get it.

The Department of Transportation has installed 45 new bike racks in response to requests from the local business improvement district, the Hudson Square Connection, which covers Manhattan’s west side between Canal and Houston Streets. The 45 new bike racks are located in a roughly 20 block area, a significant expansion of bicycle parking.

In a press release, Hudson Square Connection President Ellen Baer tied the request for bike racks not only to a desire to make the neighborhood more environmentally friendly, but to demands from area employees. “We are seeing an increasing volume of people biking to work and building owners are receiving a growing number of requests to provide amenities for cyclists,” she said.

The new racks come at a what might be an especially opportune time. The local community board has requested that the city upgrade the Hudson Street bike lane, which cuts right through the area, into a parking-protected lane, a change that if implemented would make cycling a more attractive way to get around the neighborhood.

It was another evening of hands-on bike-share station planning at Manhattan Community Board 2 last night, as New Yorkers hunched over maps of SoHo and Greenwich Village, marking the best places to site bike-share kiosks.

If you live or work in the bike-share service area, you really ought to mark your calendar for the station planning meeting in your neck of the woods. There’s something very gratifying about the process that NYC DOT and Alta Bikeshare have put together for people to rate different sites. Each time you put a sticker on the map, you’re shaping the bike-share system in a small but tangible way.

The other thing is that you never know who else will show up. Last night, former Talking Heads frontman and one-time Summer Streets spokesperson David Byrne was in the house, marking up a map. If the pattern holds, it looks like Jay-Z will be on hand for the Manhattan CB 6 workshop later this month, and John Franco and John Starks might turn up at Brooklyn CB 2.

Every afternoon, all four lanes of Varick Street are packed solid with traffic heading to the Holland Tunnel. Drivers block crosswalks and cross-streets as they press forward, hoping the traffic would continue to move ahead and guessing wrong. On Friday afternoons, you can hear the honking from Streetsblog HQ, ten blocks over and twelve stories up.

The unpleasant and unsafe conditions created at the mouth of the tunnel are a top priority for the Hudson Square Connection, the business improvement district in charge of the area between Houston and Canal and Sixth Avenue and Greenwich Street. The BID’s latest focus is on keeping crosswalks clear for pedestrians in this gridlocked part of the city.

“Unlike other business improvements districts which were created to address security or sanitation issues, in this neighborhood our businesses want something done about the traffic,” said BID president Ellen Baer in a statement. “We need to even the playing field so that pedestrians can safely get from one place to another in the district.”

Already, the BID has worked with the Department of Transportation to install yield to pedestrian signs, move stop lines for vehicles back from crosswalks, and create exclusive pedestrian phases into the signal timing at area intersections.

In its most recent effort to make the area more friendly for pedestrians, the BID is hiring pedestrian managers to keep intersections on Varick clear. NYPD traffic enforcement agents are already stationed on Varick below Spring Street, said Baer, but the gridlock extends all the way north to Houston. The pedestrian managers will keep drivers from blocking crosswalks or intersections along the rest of Varick.

Said Baer, “Our priority here, with our pedestrian traffic managers, is to assure the convenience and safety of pedestrians.” Compare that to how an NYPD officer near the Lincoln Tunnel described his job: “My objective is the cars, not the people.”

The BID is also working toward a comprehensive reimagining of the area’s streetscape, said Baer, which should be unveiled towards the beginning of next year. “This area, which was originally the printing district years ago, was an area that worked well for printers,” she said. “Now you have a more dense population here.”

Baer wouldn’t reveal what might be in the plan while it’s still under development, but a few clues are available on the BID’s website. Signe Nielsen, a principal at the landscape architecture firm leading the streetscape redesign work, suggested in an interview that “Other ideas include street closings or shared streets that can become seasonal or weekend places that can offer different opportunities for interaction and engagement.” One flyer for a public meeting on the plan brought up the idea of “reclaiming/rebalancing road space” as a topic for discussion. This definitely seems like a plan and a neighborhood worth keeping an eye on.

When Jasmijn Rijcken, the general manager of the VANMOOF bicycle company, traveled from Amsterdam to New York in late April, she was excited to see what she’d heard described as a city that had embraced bicycling. It wasn’t NYC’s new protected bike lanes that defined her ride through the city, however, but the New York Police Department, currently in the midst of a major crackdown against cyclists.

Rijcken was in town for the New Amsterdam Bike Show on April 30. After she had dismounted on Broadway in SoHo, an NYPD officer stopped, berated, and threatened to ticket Rijcken for wearing a skirt while cycling, which, it must be noted, is entirely legal and common. Rijcken says the officer told her that her skirt was dangerous because she would distract drivers and potentially cause them to crash.

“I was standing there next to my bike, looking at my map, and then this police guy stops and starts telling me about my skirt,” reported Rijcken. “At first I thought he was making a joke or maybe even a compliment, but then I found out he was serious because he got really mad.”

The officer got out of his car and threatened to ticket her, said Rijcken, even though, it bears repeating, there is no law against biking in a skirt. The justification for a potential ticket was the danger her exposed skin posed to everyone on the street. “That was the bottom line, that I was very dangerous,” said Rijcken. “I think every woman, even when walking in a skirt, would be dangerous then.”

According to Rijcken, the cop’s words were not merely an empty threat. He took her ID and only began to back down when he saw that she was Dutch. She hurriedly explained that in Amsterdam, it’s common for women to bike in skirts. In the end, the officer told her she should change into pants and let her go.

At the time, Rijcken said, she wasn’t sure that she hadn’t broken the law. “If you’re by yourself in a different country and a police guy comes really angrily at you, you get scared,” she said.

This is not the first time an NYPD officer has stopped cyclists for completely frivolous non-offenses. In April, a private school administrator received a ticket for biking with a tote bag on her handlebars. The police have not responded to a Streetsblog inquiry about Rijcken’s allegations.

Her harassment at the hands of the police has colored Rijcken’s perception of not only New York City but the United States. “I was shocked,” she said. “In Holland, people refer to America as the country of freedom.”

Last Thursday evening, Manhattan Community Board 2 voted down five of six approved pop-up cafés in their neighborhood, choosing parking spaces over public seating.

In the wake of that defeat, we were hoping that, as with Midwestern governors sending their high speed rail dollars to California, their loss would be someone else’s gain. Would those cafés pop up on another neighborhood’s street?

Unfortunately, that won’t be happening. The 12 cafés proposed by DOT, listed at the bottom of this Post article, were the full list of applicants that met all of DOT’s siting criteria, according to a department spokesperson. Accordingly, CB 2′s decision to kill its pop-up cafés won’t mean that somewhere else can get them instead.

There will still be some new pop-ups, however. According to DOT, Community Board 6 has approved a pop-up café in front of Le Pain Quotidien on Third Avenue near 45th Street. The only pop-up café approved outside of Manhattan, sponsored by Cobble Hill’s Ecopolis Café, received a unanimous vote from the CB 2 transportation committee, though it still needs a vote from the full board. The two remaining locations, both in Midtown, had not been presented to their community boards as of the end of last week.

When DOT installed its first “pop-up café” over a few parking spaces on Lower Manhattan’s Pearl Street last summer, the 14-table public seating area helped increase business by 14 percent at its two sponsoring restaurants. With New York City still recovering from recession and much of the city starved for public space, DOT has moved to expand the program. Restaurants were given the option of requesting a café and DOT selected twelve locations from that pool of applicants. The selected locations are concentrated in the Village and SoHo, making tonight’s Community Board 2 vote a critical moment for the program.

The pop-up café program is an import from San Francisco, where what they call “parklets” have replaced parking spaces with seating across the city. In New York’s program, the cafés are paid for by nearby restaurants looking for more nearby seating and greater visibility, though the seating is open to all and restaurants aren’t allowed to provide table service to the café. The cafés are only allowed in neighborhoods where there isn’t space for regular sidewalk cafés.

The basic premise is that in these neighborhoods, the balance between space for people and space for storing cars is out of whack; businesses will do better with more seating than with more parking.

DOT has decided to give community boards the total power to veto any pop-up café, according to the Downtown Express, which has editorialized in support of the program. Since more than half of the proposed locations are in the Village or SoHo, tonight’s vote by Community Board 2 will largely determine the shape of the project citywide.

Though CB 2′s transportation committee approved six out of the seven proposed applications in the area, tonight’s full board vote is expected to be more contentious. Sean Sweeney, co-chair of the board’s landmarks committee, strongly opposes the pop-up café concept, telling the Express, “It’s a commercial use incompatible with residential use.” Sweeney has a habit of using his organization, the Soho Alliance, to oppose any change in the neighborhood, including bike lanes and car-free streets.

The full board will vote tonight after allowing public testimony on this and other issues. Show up at 6:00 p.m. tonight at SEIU Local 32BJ’s offices, 101 Avenue of the Americas, 22nd Floor, to let the board know that you think supporting local businesses and creating public space is more important than a few parking spaces in this largely car-free neighborhood.

Canal Street, to put it mildly, is due for a makeover. The street is clogged with traffic from the Holland Tunnel and the un-tolled Manhattan Bridge. Pedestrians jostle for space on the packed sidewalks, and they’re especially at risk of getting hit by a car, according to the city’s Pedestrian Safety Study.

Fortunately, the funds are in place for an eventual reconstruction and re-imagination of the street, thanks to federal World Trade Center emergency relief aid. To help determine how to design Canal Street, which must strike a balance between serving the local community and the regional transportation system, NYMTC, the region’s metropolitan planning organization, has been engaged in a nearly decade-long process of studying the area and drawing up recommendations for the corridor.

In a report released last Thursday [PDF], NYMTC recommends making Canal Street friendlier for pedestrians by adding significant amounts of sidewalk space. But larger changes, in particular the creation of a carpool lane in the Holland Tunnel, weren’t included. According to the NYMTC report, NYCDOT has agreed to use the recommendations to inform its plans, though a DOT spokesperson said only that the agency was reviewing the findings.

The Canal Area Transportation Study process began in 2002, and the first phase ended with some relatively small improvements to the area, like high-visibility crosswalks, new signage, and temporary improvements near Allen Street. Since 2005, the second, larger-scale phase of the study has been underway, bringing together all the regional transportation agencies as well as others with a stake in the project.

The NYMTC team studied a wide array of congestion-busting ideas for the corridor. Some, like two-way tolling on the Verrazano Bridge or congestion pricing, were dismissed because they required legislative approvals well outside the project’s scope. Transit expansions, like bringing the PATH train north from the World Trade Center or building light rail on Canal, were rejected as too costly. Some ideas were nixed because they lacked community support or because they conflicted with New York City’s Street Design Manual. Other ambitious proposals, like keeping traffic off side streets including Pell, Doyers, Mosco, and Mulberry, were referred to the appropriate agency for further study.

What’s left still has a lot to like.

Read more…

SoHo's Petrosino Square was one of the first places identified by the New York City Streets Renaissance as a prime candidate for pedestrian reclamation. The western edge of the square, defined by Lafayette Street, used to give way abruptly to an inexplicable expanse of asphalt. No longer. At a ribbon-cutting ceremony yesterday, officials unveiled a new Petrosino. The square now extends 20 feet farther into Lafayette Street and 156 feet closer to Spring Street on the north. Stay tuned for a report from Streetfilms' Robin Urban Smith. (City Room also has a nice recap and great historical background on the square's namesake, Lieutenant Joseph Petrosino, a trailblazing New York City police officer murdered by the Sicilian mafia while on assignment in Palermo, Italy 100 years ago.)

We have a few still shots for now, and some archival footage of the old Petrosino from the Streetfilms vault, featuring Streetsblog publisher Mark Gorton and Project for Public Spaces' Ethan Kent. Yes, they filmed this just four years ago:

After the jump, a shot from Robin showing the square's spiffy new bike parking.

Read more...

Earlier this week Suffolk County prosecutors charged Donald MacPherson, proprietor of a Manhattan S&M dungeon, with orchestrating a $50 million mortgage fraud out in Southampton. If, like me, you have only a fleeting familiarity with the subterranean torture fetish community, you're probably wondering, "Who is Don MacPherson?"

Well, in addition to running the aforementioned shell game and bondage business, he pens a blog called Soho Politics, where he's been known to rail against car-free streets, bike lanes, and other measures to make the public right-of-way more pleasant for pedestrians, cyclists, and bus riders. Followers of the downtown community board scene knew MacPherson as an ally of the Soho Alliance's Sean Sweeney on CB 2, from which the alleged scammer recently resigned. Now the world knows him as the whips-n-chains guy who made a fraudulent fortune off the real estate bubble.

This stencil appeared on the corner of Manhattan's Duane and Greenwich Streets late last month. Our source tells us the message -- "DOT what will it be, traffic light or dead like me" -- stems from years of fruitless neighborhood efforts, as documented in this Streetfilm from 2006, to persuade the agency to install a signal at what residents say is a dangerous intersection. Community Board 1, Council Member Alan Gerson and Borough President Scott Stringer have joined the call, but to no avail.

Our tipster also speculates that this latest attempt could be the work of the SoHo Alliance, which we're told has also demonstrated for the cause. What say you, Mr. Sweeney?